arabic

arabic

Arabic is a language native to the Arabian Peninsula. Territorial expansion in the Middle Ages and the dissemination of the Koran are spreading the Arabic language which is the liturgical language of Islam, in Asia (Middle East and Near East), North Africa and Europe (Cyprus, Crete, Iberian Peninsula, Malta and Sicily). Spoken first by Arabs, this Semitic language that extends geographically over several continents, extends sociologically to non-Arabs, and is today the official language of several international organizations.

Diglossia is a character of the Arabic language that distinguishes vernacular Arabic and literary Arabic. The level of literary language includes the classical Arabic (pre-Koranic, Koranic, and post-Koranic) and Modern Standard Arabic. The level of vernacular language includes all the varieties of regional Arabic dialects.

The vectors of the cultural influence of the Arabic language are the Islamic religion, poetic and prosaic literature and audiovisual media including the Internet. An important historical vector of its influence is the intrusion of lexical Arabic terms in foreign languages, such as Romance languages like French.

The linguistic study of the Arabic language is propaedeutic and grammatical and is complemented by related sciences like lexicology. The propaedeutic study examines the pronunciation of Arabic and specializes in phonetics and phonology. The propaedeutic study focuses then on the writing of the Arabic language, which is written from right to left. The graphics system consists of an Arabic alphabet derived from the Phoenician alphabet, type abjad, which notes only the consonants, complemented by diacritics (like the hamza) and numbers derived from Indic scripts.

The grammar of the Arabic language, an inflected language, studies the formation of words (morphology) and the composition of words into sentences (syntax). Some of the linguistic sciences that are complementary to it are semantics and stylistics of Arabic, in addition to lexicography which studies the vocabulary and allows the development of dictionaries.